Sven Wilson - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Sven Wilson

PS: Political Science & Politics, 2010

Professor Gary C. Bryner passed away on March 10, 2010, at age 58. Gary courageously faced the ch... more Professor Gary C. Bryner passed away on March 10, 2010, at age 58. Gary courageously faced the challenge of pancreatic cancer with more concern about his wife, family, and friends than for himself. Gary personified the ideal colleague. He was unfailing in his willingness to assist others with their research and was a devoted teacher. He was always first to volunteer when help was needed. Although the cancer progressed quickly, he was grateful for the time he could spend after the diagnosis with his wife, his three children and their spouses, and his three grandchildren.

Research Objective: Marital status has been associated with outcomes in several cancer sites, inc... more Research Objective: Marital status has been associated with outcomes in several cancer sites, including breast cancer. Little is known about the relationship between marital status and colon cancer treatment and outcomes. We explored whether marital status was associated with colon cancer treatment and outcomes using cancer registry data from the US Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Program. Methods: Marital

World Development, 2011

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the a... more This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http://www.elsevier.com/copyright

Social Science & Medicine, 2007

Evidence provided by Weir and Smith, particularly the findings from the National Health and Nutri... more Evidence provided by Weir and Smith, particularly the findings from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), leads us to conclude that an increase in arthritis prevalence during the 1990s in the United States is probable, but the trend is likely overstated in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We show that a mistake in our earlier method does not change substantively our previous conclusion that survey duration effects are occurring in the HRS, a finding that is also supported by a variety of regression models (including that of Weir and Smith). Furthermore, very little evidence exists for an upward trend among self-reporters in the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), and less than 25% of the increase in the HRS over the 1990s can be attributed to increases in obesity.

Research Papers in Economics, 2003

Older black men experienced similar long-run declines in the prevalence of respiratory disorders ... more Older black men experienced similar long-run declines in the prevalence of respiratory disorders and arthritis and musculoskeletal conditions as whites and greater declines in cardiovascular disorders. Using data on Union Army veterans we find very high rates of arteriosclerosis among blacks in 1910 relative to whites and to blacks today and attribute these differences to blacks ’ greater lifelong burden of infection. Infectious disease, especially respiratory infections at older ages, rheumatic fever, and syphilis, predicted arteriosclerosis. Additional risk factors for arteriosclerosis were being born in the 2 nd relative to the 4 th quarter and a low BMI. Differences in infectious disease exposure and in susceptibility to infectious disease may explain the persistence of black-white mortality differences. Black men age 65-74 in 2003 were 1.5 times as likely as white men to die from all causes and 1.6 times as likely as white men to die from circulatory disease *. Differences in b...

At the end of the U.S Civil War, veterans had to choose whether to return to their prewar communi... more At the end of the U.S Civil War, veterans had to choose whether to return to their prewar communities or move to new areas. The late 19th Century was a time of sharp urban growth as workers sought out the economic opportunities offered by cities. By estimating discrete choice migration models, we quantify the tradeoffs that veterans faced. Veterans were less likely to move far from their origin and avoided urban immigrant areas and high mortality risk areas. They also avoided areas that opposed the Civil War. Veterans were more likely to move to a neighborhood or a county where men from their same war company lived. This co-location evidence highlights the existence of persistent social networks. Such social networks had long-term consequences: veterans living close to war time friends enjoyed a longer life.

Health and Labor Force Participation over the Life Cycle

Armed Forces & Society, 2020

Military service is a highly social—and potentially socializing—experience. However, the long-ter... more Military service is a highly social—and potentially socializing—experience. However, the long-term social effect of military service is a little-studied topic, and some have dismissed any direct impact of service on civic participation. Using data from a large, national survey, our estimates show, in contrast, that the likelihood and intensity of group participation is higher among veterans than other men and that combat veterans have the highest level of participation. Mettler argued that education funded through the GI Bill gave veterans both resources (“civic capacity”) and a desire to reciprocate to society (“civic predisposition”) for the generous benefits they received, but she did not allow for the possibility that service itself could also increase both civic capacity and predisposition. Furthermore, our estimates confirm that education is strongly associated with higher civic participation and that the association between military service and participation is largely indepe...

Economics & Human Biology, 2019

Data in brief, 2018

We describe the publicly available data created by the NIA funded Early Indicators program projec... more We describe the publicly available data created by the NIA funded Early Indicators program project, often referred to as the Union Army data, and the subset of these data used in "Persistent Social Networks: Civil War Veterans Who Fought Together Co-Locate in Later Life" (Costa et al., Forthcoming) [1]. This data subset can be used for reproducibility and extensions and also illustrates how the original complex data derived from archival administrative records can be used.

A major justification for devoting resources to the study of public health is the potential to an... more A major justification for devoting resources to the study of public health is the potential to answer questions about the burden of poor health, both in terms of the total burden faced by individuals and the burden placed upon publicly funded social insurance programs. Indeed, the adequate provision of social insurance programs is one of the key policy issues of our day. A potentially fruitful approach in undertaking this effort is to investigate the effects of specific chronic diseases and injuries upon program participation and benefit levels. Ideally, we would like to know something about the total economic costs of individual diseases using theoretically sound willingness-to-pay measures. In practice, however, willingness-to-pay measures cannot be estimated with most available health data. Though this paper cannot pin down anything as ambitious as the total economic burden of disease, it does address the narrower but still important question of what is the burden of chronic illness upon Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) payments, and it documents how that burden has shifted between different disease groups over the past century. Furthermore, it addresses, at least to a limited extent, the profound intellectual question of what determines disability and how biomedical, economic, social, and institutional factors determine whether an individual will be disabled. In this paper we begin an exploration of newly collected data on the health conditions and disability benefits of Union Army VeteransI and make comparisons to recipients of disability benefits in more recent tinmes. We find two main results. The first is that there has been a significant shift in the types of diseases that lead to disability, both in terms of prevalence rates and benefit levels. The second is more surprising: the disabled in modern times generally have a greater number of chronic illnesses than did disabled Union Army veterans, even those who were severely disabled. This result implies a way of thinking about disease and disability that deserves more research attention. In short, prior to the advent of modem medicine and the concurrent reductions in the physical demands of work, people became disabled not because they had numerous chronic illnesses (i.e., high rates of co-morbidity), but because individual conditions (even ones as simple as hernias or hemorrhoids) had much more severely debilitating effects on health and upon the capacity to work than those same conditions do today.

The Economists' Voice, 2009

Brad Delong mischaracterizes economic options, according to Sven Wilson of Brigham Young University.

Population Research and Policy Review, 2002

This study explores the impact of health status on marital dissolution for couples in late mid-li... more This study explores the impact of health status on marital dissolution for couples in late mid-life. A key feature of the empirical framework is that it incorporates the interaction of health between the spouses. This specification allows not only a general test of whether health matters but also a specific test of an important implication of cost-benefit models of marriage

Social Science & Medicine, 2005

Researchers have long viewed large, longitudinal studies as essential for understanding chronic i... more Researchers have long viewed large, longitudinal studies as essential for understanding chronic illness and generally superior to cross-sectional studies. In this study, we show that (1) age-specific arthritis prevalence in the longitudinal Health and Retirement Study (HRS) from the United States has risen sharply since its inception in 1992, and (2) this rise is almost surely spurious. In periods for which the data sets are comparable, we find no such increase in the cross-sectional National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), the primary source for prevalence data of chronic conditions in the US. More important, the upward trend in the HRS is not internally consistent: even though prevalence in the HRS rises sharply between 1992 and 1996 for 55-56 year-olds, the prevalence for that age group plummets to its 1992 level among the new cohort added in 1998 and then rises rapidly again between 1998 and 2002. We discuss possible reasons for these discrepancies and demonstrate that they are not due to sample attrition in the HRS.